Friday nights are freakier at the Dairy Arts Center. Since 2016, the nonprofit creative hub has welcomed local weirdos to its weekly screening of underground films you won’t find on Netflix. From arthouse horror to B-movie madness and shades in between, the long-running subversive cinema series known as Friday Night Weird (FNW) is the region’s definitive showcase of all things out of pocket.
For our new monthly column, Boulder Weekly checked in with co-curator and “Queen of the Weird” Shay Wescott for a preview of what’s on deck this month.
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Coma
Friday, Aug. 2
Bertrand Bonello, 2022, France, 1:22, NR
Don’t call Coma a COVID film. Wescott says it’s so much more. The latest from French auteur Bertrand Bonello — whose sci-fi drama The Beast screened as part of FNW’s June lineup — follows an isolated 18-year-old living through unprecedented times (sound familiar?) who finds herself entranced by a mysterious vlogger named Patricia Coma. What follows is a reality-bending swirl of animation, unsettling online uploads and a surreal melodrama starring Barbie dolls.
“Less focused on the specifics of the pandemic, it’s really a fever dream interpretation of what it feels like to be alive now, exploring isolation, politics, social media and overall modern anxieties from a darkly comic and unexpectedly empathetic standpoint,” Wescott says. “And if you pay attention, it’s really a love letter from one generation of artists to the next. It’s actually this sort of validation of young people’s anxieties that I think is really lacking from so much of the art we see in the mainstream.”
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Crumb Catcher
Friday, Aug. 9
Chris Skotchdopole, 2024, USA, 1:43, NR
The honeymoon is over for Shane and Leah. The newlyweds, played by Rigo Garay and Ella Rae Peck, face the first big stress test of their marriage when a pair of unhinged entrepreneurs make their big pitch through a blackmail plot that sends the young couple’s lives careening into chaos. The directorial debut of Chris Skotchdopole, this home-invasion story is a searing send-up of American life from an emergent new cinematic voice.
“It’s like watching an episode of Shark Tank in the universe of Funny Games,” Wescott says. “Some might label it a thriller or a horror movie; it’s also a dark comedy about the absurd desperation of the American Dream. Skotchdopole manages to juggle all of these tones throughout the film, but it’s definitely at its best when things start going totally off the rails.”
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The Vourdalak
Friday, Aug. 23
Adrien Beau, 2024, France, 1:30, NR
As we’ve established in this column, Wescott is a sucker for a good vampire flick. So if you missed last month’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, you’ll want to mark your calendar for this atmospheric adaptation of a gothic novella by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy that predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by more than 50 years.
“In a current horror landscape where grief and trauma are possibly becoming played-out tropes, The Vourdalak combines modern metaphorical horror movie themes, retro ’70s-era filmmaking aesthetics, ancient Slovak folklore, and against all odds, effective puppetry, in surprising ways,” Wescott says. “Especially impressive is the fact that this film, which feels like it appeared out of another era or possibly another dimension, is a directorial debut for Beau.”
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Black Tight Killers
Friday, Aug. 30
Yasuharu Hasebe, 1966, Japan, 1:26, NR
If you ask Wescott, nobody does strange cinema quite like Japan. To wit: Yasuharu Hasebe’s Black Tight Killers, a candy-coated romp about a flight attendant named Yoriko (Chieko Matsubara) kidnapped by a team of women assassins armed with vinyl records. Her last hope is a photographer (Akira Kobayashi) who faces a gauntlet of go-go dancing ninjas and bullets made of bubble gum. Got it?
“From Godzilla’s sillier period to the arthouse horror of Kwaidan and Hausu, Japanese Noir or basically anything Meiko Kaji starred in, there was a lot to love in Japanese genre cinema from the ’60s and ’70s,” she says. “Like many of these films, plot is completely beside the point in Black Tight Killers, but the nonsense of it all makes it that much more fun. It is openly silly and kitsch, but also sexy, violent and irresistibly stylish — kind of like Austin Powers directed by Quentin Tarantino.”